I also sing a little, write songs, record & music. I’m a decent audio engineer and editor too. Sometimes I do voice-over work, or commercial production. In the past, I have done some acting on stage and screen. I tinker, a tiny bit, with video and graphic design/presentation. I write, and I think I have two novels in me, but I’m reluctant to put any energy toward them.

So when I write, it’s usually in blog form, which takes us to this writ.

Being a classic ADHD (not so much the H part) sufferer, it’s difficult to focus on something unless I can HYPERFOCUS. Get me working on any of these creative exercises, and I can lose a whole day.

At the end of 2017, I shared a fairly large pile of recordings with the world, which I put on my website, and called“The Sincerest Form of Flattery, Vol.1” These are just cover songs I recorded for fun, to share with friends. Obviously, the name implies that there are more to come, and I truly intend to do so.

Ouch. Yeah.

Realistically, it’s May now, and I haven’t put much energy towards those new songs yet. Getting back into creative music mode in the studio has been a hard engine to start. I’ll blame ankle-surgery, but there has been a fair amount of binge-watching Netflix and Amazon Prime Video.

So whilst I’ve been putzing around…

A friend of mine who lives afar had mentioned several times in the past, that it would be fun to work on a music project together. Well, he popped the question, and I accepted. So, even though this is a very busy (and tired) time, I forced myself to sit down and ride the music wave last night. The hardest part is swimming out into the proverbial ocean. So I swam, and I listened, and I thought a slide guitar might be a nice interpretation.

Two and a half hours later, I came up from the depths, to get a breath of air.

Whoa.

It’s fun to be back in the saddle, making music for someone -even if it’s just one song- again. How nice to shake some of the rust off of my modest (at best) slide guitar skills! Of course I used my Telecaster. Of course I did! Well, the intonation on it is all out of sorts, the strings are old, the volume pot is busted, and the whole damn guitar is noisy. Of course I used it anyway.

I finished a basic rhythm track (which may have been unnecessary) and a slide solo, and threw some ad-lib slide parts here and there. I will probably do some better ad-libs later. Then I get to do some studio singing, which I haven’t done in like six months.

On the periphery of all of this, I’m now performing somewhat regularly in an acoustic duo called The Mood Rings. We keep getting gigs offered to us, and having great ease booking new ones.

A few years ago, I was frantically busy with music stuff just to keep my name recognizeable, and my income steady. Now I get to do it for fun and inspiration.

I wouldn’t change a thing… except that I’d like to be performing with an electric guitar a little more.

We’ll see what the next half of the year brings.

What’s your creative outlet? Do you do it because you love it, or because it’s an obligation? If you could do something else, what would it be? Do you create because you love creating, or because you want recognition/fame/money? ‘Fess up.

I used to get very serious around this time of year. Some of that was stress or cynicism, maybe part of a youthful desperation to be cool. That’s all long past. Now I simply enjoy the opportunities for merriment and lightness. So if you’re looking for something deep and/or meaningful. it ain’t here.

So…

Lately I have been busily replicating or re-inventing cover songs (the choice of song is pretty random). I enjoy the challenge of trying to exactly replicate an arrangement; finding the right sounds, playing the right notes, etc.

Changing a song is easier in some ways, since matching the original is already an ethic that has been discarded. However, changing a well-known song is a huge risk. Well, I like risks. In fact, here I am with my brown pompadour and matching tie/pants emsemble, cheerfully hastening toward risk.

As Christmas careens recklessly around the corner from Thanksgiving and heads straight at us like a windshield towards a bug, I start thinking about working on Christmas music. This of course, is way too late to achieve results.

So I started earlier this year. Actually, I started LAST YEAR, and just casually refined and finished them this year.

The first is “Away In A Manger,” which was recently described to me as a boring carol that could never be redeemed. The next is “Children Go Where I Send Thee.” Over the years I have voiced my low opinion of turning hymns and Christmas carols into ROCK SONGS. So you may hereby enjoy my admitted hypocrisy.

This is approximately how I looked while recording, except that I have way better guitars, a taller tree, and my recording space may never be this tidy.

For “Away In A Manger,” I wrote a chanting sort of chorus to break up the cloying verses. I had hoped that my church’s creative team might like to see the band work this up, but they just sorta sat there looking uncomfortable.

Me: “Hey guys, I worked up a rockin’ version of ‘Away In A Manger.’ I think the band could do it. What do you think?”

Them: …

Had I known they were going to balk, I might have done it in a higher key (the music director is a baritone). That said, the guitar riff works a whole lot better in this key. Maybe it’s just not that good. In any case…Here’s “Away In A Manger.”

Moving forward…

“Children Go Where I Send Thee” presented some challenges. First of all, it goes on FOREVER. So I abbreviated it, added a modulation, a Pink Floyd flavored guitar solo, some Queen-flavored harmonies, and threw in a little joke as the numbers count down. Enjoy the hilarious levity.

Here’s “Children Go Where I Send Thee”

How do you break out of creative conventions? What do you think of my silly little Christmas experiments? How do you creatively cope with the assorted holiday vibes? Feel free to share your thoughts.
~See you in 2018~

I had been dating a girl whom I had thought was “the one,” only to discover that she was losing interest. I didn’t understand it at the time, but she was growing up, and I wasn’t. Eventually, the whole thing just unraveled badly, and I wrote a tsunami of negativity-fueled music. Oh, the angst!

The good news is that I met someone much better, and married her, and this has been working out well ever since. But as I finally grew up, my young angst waned, and I discovered that I had learned how to write from all new previously-untapped emotional places. Nothing fuels one to write sad songs like having experienced real heartache.

In the midst of my emotional repairs, I had become fascinated with early-sixties Southwestern musical landscapes. I set out to write several songs in this vein, and only succeeded in finishing one (and it may not even sound like what I thought it should). That song is “Catapulting Wishes.”

I imagined this whole story:

There’s this old farmer. Farmer? I don’t know. But he lives out in this wide barren area. In his youth, he set out to start a farm or a business or something, and it was successful for a short time. The town was starting to grow and thrive. He married his sweetheart, and they prepared for a nice life. But then, the interstate went through, or the factory moved, or the mine closed. The town shrank, the farm withered, whatever. Finally it was just the two of them scraping by, hoping that next month… maybe the month after that… or after that… something would change.

Finally, something changed. One day, she was gone. Maybe she left? Maybe she died? Like I said, I don’t know. You write the story!

But the image around which I built the whole song was that he has taken all of the scrap lumber from the shed, and built a catapult. Now instead of just “wishing upon a star,” he has assembled this tragic contraption to launch his wishes at the stars. Just like he spent his youth trying to build a life in the wrong place, now he’s spending all this time and energy wishing and wishing and wishing.

My old band Lux recorded this song, right when our sound was changing from something angsty and perhaps Grunge-y like Soundgarden, into something more mellow and ambient. It seemed like a good idea to mix all our sounds together on one album. That worked for bands like The Beatles, Zeppelin, and The Rolling Stones, right? Well, in our case, everyone found something to dislike on that album. It fell rather flat, and we all went on to other things. So “Catapulting Wishes” could really be the theme of that whole experience.

I managed to save all of the original tracks of that album. Periodically, I mess around with them. A couple of years ago, I decided to redo my guitars and vocals (the recordings were pretty terrible). So I kept the original drums, added some percussion, re-recorded the bass, and see what I could make of it.

["This? Why I could make a hat, or a brooch, or a pterodactyl."]

As is common, I set it down, and forgot about it. So I just dug it back up on a Sunday night, re-re-recorded one guitar track, and mixed it on a Monday. On Tuesday, I put a clumsy video together. Check it out.

Have you ever managed to capture your own melancholy in art; a story, a visual medium, a song, or something else? Have you ever created something that turned out to perfectly sum up a whole experience, before that experience was even over? Speak, my people!

My first guitar instructor attempted to teach me Jazz when I was a kid. I wasn’t all that interested in Jazz, but I practiced.

Side note: This kid actually looks a little like my son, who has, as of yet, never expressed any interest in holding a guitar. Alas.

It was clear after a while that I had plateaued. Fortuitously, my teacher moved across town, and the lesson arrangement ended about the time it had become obsolete. In the months that followed, my playing ability EXPLODED.

I learned more in the few months that followed, as I was finally free to work through the information and instructions as they spilled back out of me, than in two years that preceded them. I looked approximately like this:

Later I studied classical guitar, but not for very long. I slid into young adulthood with a few jazz chords in my pocket, and some proper classically-induced structure and dexterity. Plus, I could solo like a BOSS, so I was determined to join the next Led Zeppelin. How hard could that be? My first band, a batch of high school friends, never took off.

The next band never even made it to a second rehearsal. The other guitarist didn’t understand rests… Soeverythingheplayedwaslikealongrunonsentencewithnobreaks.

It was astonishing.

A few months later, I ended up in a cover band with some guys who were a few years older. We had a casual run playing gigs about once a month on average, for about four years or so. It was in that band (which had no name) that I learned how to apply all those years of music lessons (I wanted to call us “Proof of Purchase”). I learned to sing harmonies, and actually became one of the principal lead singers (The other guitarist didn’t like the name, and was bossy). I learned how to write and arrange, to record and produce (Seriously, he wanted us to be called “Cornerstone,” or something cornball like that). It was then that I realized I was in a dead-end band (which still had no name, and obviously tended toward bad taste). The other guys were hobbyists at best, and weren’t interested in turning from their career plans to make music with a bozo like me.

I was the ripe old age of 22 when it ended. The band had a meeting, decided on a hiatus, and then started back up again without me. I was more driven to create and perform, and they were more interested in just having fun. I became obsolete, and found the freedom to pursue my own music (Quite honestly, I had no intention of going back). So I spent the better part of a summer recording some songs I had written, using thoroughly lousy equipment. It turned out to be a surprisingly good recording.

Six months later, I started attending a church I had visited a few times with my college girlfriend. I ended up playing in the worship band, and this was right when I was reinventing myself as a guitarist. For about 18 months, I learned to be a sideman, developed my tone, and experimented with new ideas. While I did that, I met two other guys who were interested in starting a band. So we started a band, and kept it going for about 5 years. Eventually the drummer got bored with the fact that we didn’t pull in huge crowds like some of his newer gigs. He bailed, and that was really the end of that. That project had become obsolete, and I became free to explore new ideas again.

I started a surge of writing and recording new songs. By that time, I was a sideman in a few bands, and got a few of the other players to help me record. My main gig built up to the biggest thing I was ever part of, and then right at the pinnacle, my singer died of a rare disease, leaving me obsolete without her voice to carry the music we wrote. After some pain, I found the freedom to set that down and move on.

Since then, I’ve produced a couple of albums, done different projects, and written music of my own again. I got involved in the music of another church, directing the music in one of their services. Over time, I’ve moved out of a music-director type role into a broader creative director type role, I’ve become obsolete in the music ministry, and it frees me up to explore new options.

It was while that role-shift was happening that one of the music teams wanted to cover Queen’s “I Want It All.”

One of the tricks to this is Queen’s propensity for triple or quadruple-stacking each vocal harmony part. So I constructed a backing track to fill in some gaps, and we performed it. Not one to waste an effort, I went ahead and casually worked on doing my own full cover of the song, which you can hear, HERE:

Why? Because I wanted to do something ambitious for fun. Because I can.

Right now I’m a grown man who plays music in America’s watering holes and houses of worship. Dudes like me… We’re not cute young things who think we’re bound for stardom. We’re normal family men. We’re the main buyers of musical products. We’re the core of the whole US economy! We’re the ones who hold the songs together when the church music sounds like junk. We’re the ones who MAKE the band sound good. And we’re the ones that change the whole atmosphere when we arrive or depart. AND, when we discover we’re obsolete, we’re the ones who discover new sounds and expressions, and make new and better music when we’re free.

Get obsolete. Leave the system. Find freedom. Leave the rest of them turning the crank on the same old machine.

Live. Play. Create.

Also, you should agree that “Proof Of Purchase” was a great band name. Humor me.

What would it look like to embrace obsolescence, get free, and discover your next new awesome step as an artist or musician? What keeps you where you are? Are you in any danger of running out of new ideas? How do you find new methods of creativity in the same sandbox?

Let me first say that it’s my great honor to have played with some of the area’s finest musicians in several of the region’s largest houses of worship. I don’t mean that they’re “good for church players.” I mean that they’re considered GREAT by anyone who hears them anywhere.

Therefore, it grieves me that since I’ve gotten to be among such fine players, as a rule, christian/worship music is so derivative and unremarkable. Certainly, it is expertly produced, copying all the most successful current formulas, but it covers no new ground. Now it’s considered provocative or edgy only if someone writes a phrase like “wet sloppy kiss.” I neither want to know the artist nor hear the song. Don’t tell me. Just. No.

I’m not convinced that these people know what deep, real songwriting entails. It can’t just be something quickly scribbled out in response to s brief emotional surge (though I concede that could legitimately happen occasionally). If the net result is a lyric that rhymes “praise” with “days” again, it might be time for a new writing scenario.

I’m not sure what chord he thinks he’s playing.

Check out this example: Regardless of your opinions on the band or the song, Led Zeppelin spent THREE YEARS writing Kashmir. First, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant traveled through the East, absorbing music and culture. Afterward, Page began writing a part he found interesting. The band began working on it together after he brought the idea in. Three years after the writing started, they completed what is generally considered their finest work. Here’s a more detailed account from Wikipedia:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashmir_(song)

Here’s another one: Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody was an idea being kicked around for a while. There is some indication that Freddie Mercury had been writing parts of it as early as the late sixties. When the song was released in 1975, they had spent three straight weeks RECORDING it (after the writing process was finished). From Wikipedia – “May, Mercury and Taylor reportedly sang their vocal parts continually for ten to twelve hours a day. [emphasis mine] The entire piece took three weeks to record, and in some sections featured 180 separate overdubs.” Read up on it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohemian_Rhapsody

Let’s be honest. Christian/worship songwriters are clearly not investing this amount of time or attention, at least in the music-composition… OK, and yeah, probably not the lyrics either. The genre seems desperate to make the smallest possible changes to its formulas, and it shows. There are no innovations or departures, only safe repetitions, tendered over and over again.

So how can this subset of the music industry move into a new era of creative growth? I think the MUSIC ITSELF has to be inspired. When you hear Kashmir, the music speaks volumes before Plant sings a syllable. It took a long time of trial and error to arrive on the sounds that were being used, and the parts each instrument played. This is what christian/worship music needs to do- something new, inspired and different… something AUTHENTIC.

An artist friend of mine attempted to pay me a compliment a couple of years ago. He said, “There’s something so worshipful about the way you play guitar.” What he tried to convey in that statement was that there was a distinct mood that was being created, and that it ushered him in to a place of deeper spiritual communion. Well, that’s exactly what I have tried to do all the time, no matter where I played (most of which was outside of the church). Success! As an artist, I want to move people emotionally/spiritually. If I’m not playing something that inspires ME, how can I expect to inspire others. That’s MY authenticity, for good or bad. It can’t just be default chords and the coolest effects. The actual phrases that I’m playing need to be saying something.

I include this picture only because it’s awesome and hilarious.

I approach what I do with great care, and a thousand questions, like… What sound am I going to make? Which guitar does it best? Which pickup? What notes/chords/fragments/phrases? Is it better to play the notes low on the neck, on the higher strings, or high on the neck on the lower strings? Will I use a different type of pick for this song? Slide? Ebow? What effects? Should I play more in concert with the song’s mood or should I add contrast?

Then I’m interested in seeing how I can get the rest of the band to interact with that.

Caution: Not everyone is ready to make changes. Worship leaders, in particular, are usually successful by perpetuating the status quo, so they have no pressing need to change their game (understandable). In my modest experience, they tend to be resistant to ideas that don’t originate with themselves or other worship leaders. If you press, you might find yourself sitting at home on Sundays.

“Look, they really just want to hear me doing the same thing I did last week.”

If you’re a guitarist (or any musician) playing in a modern church, what can you do to drive your music team into a new place of authentic expression? Do you just copy the trends because the trends are what your bandmates expect to hear? Or do you reach for something beyond the music; something you hear in your heart/mind that you’re inspired to find on your fretboard (or equivalent)? I will always try to bring the full measure of my influences and inspiration to my playing, either inside or outside the church. What about you?